Hold Your Tongue ('Do Bhéal a Dhruidim')
by TheMollyBee
Summary: "This case... with my Mulder-Vision, I can spot at least three things you'd be leaping on." "Oh, Scully, talk dirty to me." Mulder and Scully! On the case! Stupid flirting! Irish legends! Set in an undefined period probably around season two or three.
1. Chapter 1

Often, when she sat in the passenger seat of whatever car they'd hired to drive through Middle America, she considered the strange turns that life could take. She had spent years studying, dedicating herself to becoming a medical doctor, and now here she was; in a dusty hatchback on a dirt road with her best friend, while he ran his mouth about frogs being extra-terrestrial lifeforms.

She chose to believe he was just messing with her. She chose to believe that a lot.

She clutched a case file in her right hand, her left trailing down the page to guide her eyes as she read.

"Mulder!" She said, drawing his eyes from the open road and his thoughts from the frog they had seen over an hour ago.

"Yes, Captain?"

"Exactly what part of this case interests you?" She asked, curling her tongue behind her teeth in a well-practiced way to stop herself from adding 'you jackass' to the end of her sentence.

"Do you need to ask?" He questioned. She rolled her eyes.

"Well, Mulder, I'm torn. It looks like a regular armed robbery, but with my Mulder-Vision, I can spot at least three things you'd be leaping on."

"Oh, Scully, talk dirty to me." She stared at him, face a blank, composed mask. He crunched a sunflower seed between his teeth and wiggled his eyebrows. She broke with a roll of her eyes, the corner of her lips twitching into a laugh.

"Number one: the assailants used bows and arrows, which may be to avoid their guns being traced, or it could be that they're vengeful spirits from the seventeenth century." She said, deadpan.

"Interesting, and worth exploring if we get a minute, but no." Mulder replied, visibly considering the idea. Scully knew him so well that the slightest movement of his knuckles on the steering wheel was enough to show her what he was thinking about. She carried on with her theories.

"Number two: the cash register at the store that was robbed ended up with marginally more money than it should have had, potentially due to an employee giving out incorrect change, but definitely more likely due to a benevolent, Robin Hood type ghost stealing cash from chain stores for the pockets of the little man."

"Oh man, if only. Fight the system, Scully." He raised his clenched fist from the steering wheel to punch the air.

"Number three: one of the witnesses is selectively mute, likely temporarily from shock, and you've connected that to other cases of shock-induced mutism in the state and decided that there's something in the water."

"Not something in the water, no." Mulder replied, his tone conveying how ridiculous the idea was.

"Oh? Something in the air?" She deadpanned.

"Can you feel it coming in the air tonight?"

"Mulder!"


	2. Chapter 2

The case, as Mulder viewed it, was built on these facts: that after three separate traumatising incidents such as the armed robbery, four witnesses had been temporarily left mute, each coughing profusely at the end of several weeks and producing small pieces of gravel that did not seem to originate from their lungs. The stone was ancient, certainly not a calcium deposit like Scully was hypothesising. His puns about gravelly voices remained unappreciated.

He pulled the car into the motel parking lot, shutting off the engine and looking over at Scully, who finished reading the page and pulled her glasses off, folding them and tucking them onto the open collar of her shirt. Today's shirt was moss green. It made her hair look brighter. Softer. They got out the car and went into their separate rooms to freshen up before they headed off to investigate.

The case had taken them to a small town outside of Texas, although the rain painted it with a grey brush making it indistinguishable from any of the other hundreds of small towns they visited. Scully had met any number of Sheriffs whose names she'd forgotten the second they drove away, each fitting with the same template in the same way. She was used to local police, to other unnecessary FBI agents interrupting and misunderstanding the case, to lawyers dealing with crimes way beyond their ken.

This lawyer, however, was different. He stood in front of them, confidence radiating from his pores and from the two inches of height over Mulder he held proudly. His hair was slicked back with heavy gel, not a single strand out of place. His suit was easily worth a thousand dollars, but his expensive Italian loafers were dusty. A 'regular city slick' as Mulder put it, like they didn't just kiss the solid D.C ground goodbye that morning.

"You're a little out of place here, sir." Scully said, approaching the anomalous man. He looked her up and down, sizing her up, which made Mulder hunch his shoulders.

"Coming from two FBI agents?" He responded, quirking an eyebrow as Scully registered his thick Irish accent.

"Scully and Mulder." She said, opening her badge and gesturing between her and Mulder, who nodded at his name.

"O'Shea. Attorney. Now, can I ask what the FBI has to do with the case? This is a simple crime, there's no need for the big guns." He said, gesturing to the interrogation room behind him, housing one of the gunmen from the armed robbery that had piqued Mulder's interest.

"That's likely true, Mr O'Shea, but my partner here likes to waste government resources, so we're going to take a look around." Scully joked, waving the man off as they began the reconnaissance of the precinct itself. Mulder stared at the floor, his head bowed, pretending not to be taking in every detail.

The precinct was the copy of every other station they'd ever found themselves in. Grey walls that may or may not have always been that colour. Cold tile flooring – occasionally linoleum, the break from routine there being a real perk. Holding cells containing the resident town drunk, slurring things that were not dissimilar to what came falling out of Mulder's monotone mouth.

They glanced into the interrogation room, making uncomfortable eye contact with a forgettable-looking man, and Mulder walked swiftly away, Scully matching his large strides to keep up with him.

"So that's our suspect." Mulder said, teeth gritted.

"Oh, the man in the interrogation room? Who would have thought?" Scully deadpanned.

"No, Scully! You're missing the obvious here!" Mulder said. Scully mentally counted to ten.

"Of course I am," She sighed, "Enlighten me."

"O'Shea! A man like that, here, now, _smiling_ at you! It's obvious!" Mulder insisted, spitting his words, his voice carrying an assumption that of course she's following his fast-paced train of madness.

"That this shampoo was a good investment?" She sassed, swishing her hair obtusely.

"He's causing mutism!" He insisted, his head poking forward like a lizard in an irritating but endearing way. She nodded slowly, more like she had water in her ears than in agreement.

"I noticed your silence back there." She teased, "Were you charmed by his hair gel?"

Mulder pulled a face.

"I know he's the one, Scully."

"Well, I'm glad you've found your soulmate, but can we get back to the case?"


	3. Chapter 3

As always seemed to happen, Scully found herself once more preparing to make an incision in a corpse because – what was the reason this time? No trusted ME around? It's 2am but the body needs to be examined right now before it vaporises? – whatever the reason, there she was, recording her findings into an overhanging microphone as she cut.

The body on her table had once been inhabited by a Sarah Keele, who'd lived a very normal life until she witnessed her local bank being robbed, and was then struck mute for several weeks. However, Sarah had not been normal in all aspects, failing to cough up the stones found in the similar cases, and instead choked and died.

Scully found small, pale grey stones barely bigger than coarse sand caught in the lining of the woman's throat. The stone was limestone, but not native to the area. Mulder hung back, lurking in the shadows of the unnecessarily dark morgue. She felt his eyes on her, and ignored the hairs on the back of her neck rising to focus on stitching up the late Mrs Keele's Y-incision. Mulder opened his mouth the drop a theory, but Scully stopped him.

"I'll admit that there is something to this case, but to suggest it's more than maybe some water contamination symptoms worsened by extreme stress… There's nothing here to suggest anything worse."

"Scully, it's –"

"It's not aliens."  
"I wasn't going to say aliens… A siren, maybe." Mulder suggested. Scully stared at him, face impassive.

"No."

"It's definitely that lawyer. O'Shea. I don't know what he's doing, but he is stealing the voice, and now the life, of innocent people." He said, growing incensed. Scully pulled off her gloves and removed her visor to look him in the eyes. One day, such a look would make his wild thoughts wither into logical ones. One day.

"What would he want with their voices, Mulder? This isn't The Little Mermaid."

"What more could a lawyer want, Scully, than the persuasive power of dozens of people combined with his own?"

"Peace and goodwill to all men?" Scully snarked.

"It's not Christmas yet, and lawyers are effectively supernatural creatures as it is. Demons. Satan, not Santa."

"Hilarious. How then, how on earth, is he stealing their voices?"

"I don't know Scully. I thought you were the scientist." He gestured to the surgical scrubs she was wearing, "You tell me how it's possible."

"It's not possible. It's not possible in the slightest."

"Okay. Okay." He said, conciliatory.

"Okay?" She questioned, hesitantly removing her apron and moving over to wash her hands. She was shocked that he'd come round to logic so swiftly this time, and thus doubtful that he truly was.

"Okay, he's not stealing their voices." He said, agreeing. He agreed. Mulder agreed with her suggestion. Scully celebrated inside for just a second.

"Thank god, you've finally seen reason!"

"He's just borrowing them." He said, matter-of-factly. Scully counted to ten. She counted to ten again.

"Mulder, one day I swear I'm going to hit you."


	4. Chapter 4

Mulder's fascination with the lawyer O'Shea had led them to the back row of the city court to watch the man at work. The man was dressed to the nines, stood at the front of the court and already sucking up the air in the room before he'd spoken a single charismatic word. They snuck in, sitting down on a wooden bench as Mulder took off his jacket to oh-so-surreptitiously throw it over them. Scully kicked it off to listen to O'Shea's opening statements in defence of an armed robber.

"Your Honour," he began, the stench of his expensive cologne oozing back, allowing a headache to start brewing behind Scully's eyes, "My client is a good man. I promise you: he is innocent." He proclaimed, and promptly sat down. The judge and jury nodded in agreement, the twelve peers all turning to each other with their decisions already evident on their faces.

"Very persuasive." Scully heard one juror say, completely without irony. The other jurors seemed to reflect that statement, murmuring between themselves.

"That's all I need to hear. Mr O'Shea, your client is free to go." The judge said, banging his gavel. O'Shea grinned as his client's handcuffs were removed, shaking his hand once it was freed. The jurors filed out of the room. The courtroom emptied. The security guard turned the lights off. Mulder and Scully stayed seated, watching the clock tick round another minute, then two. O'Shea lingered at the front, seemingly unaware of their presence.

"Did we miss something?" Mulder asked Scully, turning to her in quiet wonder.

"I guess we're immune to his charms." Scully said, watching the lawyer stow unused documents back in his briefcase. He stopped to shake a small vial over the bench, a vial of grey powder that he then lined up with what Mulder assumed to be a business card. He knelt down next to it, made the sign of the cross, and proceeded to snort the powder.

"Charms, Scully, or chemical confidence?" Mulder asked. Scully rolled her eyes so hard it hurt a little. O'Shea gathered his things and left the room. Mulder and Scully stayed seated.

"Cocaine has never had that kind of power. Hell, if it did, it would be considerably more expensive." Scully said.

"Look at you, all grown up; knowing the street value of cocaine. I've never been more proud. I'd be prouder if you hadn't assumed it was cocaine though. It's obviously a supernatural compound." Mulder said, obviously proud, but looking down on her in a physical and what she felt was a metaphorical way too.

"Ah, yes; from the ghost and zombie elemental table! I can't believe that slipped my mind!" She replied, sarcastic, rising from the pew to leave the courtroom. Mulder followed.

"Have you got a better theory?" He asked.

"He's a hypnotist." Scully replied, pulling out the most logical idea she had at that moment. Mulder scoffed.

"That doesn't explain the powder."

"Well, you're the cocaine expert today, what else could it be?" Scully asked, praying that for once Mulder would come out with a sold, sensible answer.

"Fairy dust?" Mulder suggested. Scully looked up to the sky.

"That's cocaine still." Scully said, arms crossed impatiently in front of her.

"No, like, actual fairy dust."

"Mulder, if it's fairies, surely they're too busy buying children's teeth to be in the back end of Texas giving dust to shady lawyers?" Scully said, deciding just to play the fairy idea out – she'd justify it a whole minute if she had to.

"The tooth fairy is just a myth, Scully." Mulder said, looking at Scully like all he wanted was to pat her on the head. Scully thought about headbutting him.

"Fairies entirely are a myth!" She said. They walked along the corridor and out of the building, "It's not fairies."

"Get woke, Scully."


	5. Chapter 5

The next morning, Scully found Mulder in his room, passed out over several large tomes, with dozens of sheets of paper coating the tacky motel carpet.

"Mulder!" She said, surprising him awake as she loudly closed a book.

"I'm awake." He said tiredly, slowly raising his head to meet her eyes. She decided against pointing out the pen ink smeared all over his face. It suited him, in a way. She smiled.

"Did you find anything?" She asked. He stood up, clutching paper so tightly she was convinced it had fused with his hand.

"Scully, oh Scully, I've found everything. I've found the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. I've cracked the case, I've solved the riddle, and I've answered the questions of the universe." He said, the pen in his mouth stopping the full grandeur of his declaration from slipping through.

"So you've no ideas then?"

"Haven't a clue." He said, removing the pen from his mouth with an exaggerated slurp. Nice.

"What's this?" Scully asked, picking a book off of the bed so she could sit down.

"It's a book on Celtic myths. I thought, you know, 'cause he's Irish, there might be an answer there." He said, shrugging.

"That's almost racist, Mulder. Do you turn to… To the Bible every time you think I'm being weird?" Scully asked, unimpressed.

"I turn to the Bible when I think about you being _freaky_." Mulder replied, eyebrows wiggling.

"You are a child." She said, holding back a little laugh – he hadn't earned that yet.

"Yes, mom." He whined.

"Was there anything in it? In your fact finding mission?" She asked, picking up random papers hoping one bore something akin to an answer.

"No. Well…" He said, obviously building to what he thought would be a big reveal. She knew his routine. No need to change it now.

"You've piqued my curiosity, please continue." She said.

"There's this legend, okay, an Irish legend about this stone called the Blarney Stone. Legend has it that in kissing the stone, one gets the 'gift of the gab' – the ability to talk with charisma and persuasiveness. Now, who could use that gift more than someone who gets paid to argue for a living?" He posed the theory. Scully looked at him like he'd grown another head – something that was sure to happen one day.

"Mulder, by your logic, there must be thousands of tourists every year coming back with this same ability; why haven't there been millions of cases of mutism like this?" She pointed out. He should his head, dismissing any holes in his theory.

"Because it only lasts a little while, it could never survive the flight. It's allergic to peanuts." He joked.

"Mulder, it doesn't exist at all, it's the placebo effect." She reasoned.

"Legends have to start somewhere, Scully. Let's say the gift exists for half a second on the lips of the person kissing the stone. Long enough for them to maybe be instilled with confidence, but not long enough for more. Now, what if there was a way of concentrating that, and making the gift last longer. Long enough to win a court case, for example." He said. Scully tried to count to ten, but stopped at three.

"You're not saying…" Scully said, her resolve and energy waning with each futile word.

"I'm saying O'Shea ground up some of the stone and is snorting it for its ancient magical properties, yes." He said, reasonable as ever.

Scully was silent.

"Scully, what do you think?" Mulder asked. Scully sighed, looking up to the heavens before she answered.

"I think…" She said, breathing in slowly to restrain herself a little, "I think that there's an alternate universe where I decided to get breakfast without you this morning, and I'm so, so jealous of that Scully."

"I can charge some pancakes to the Bureau for _this_ Scully, if that would help." Mulder suggested. Scully shook her head.

"This Scully needs bacon."


	6. Chapter 6

"There is one issue." Scully said, pausing between bites of her breakfast. The diner Mulder had dragged her to was full of 50s knick-knacks for originality, ironically making it exactly like the last fourteen places they'd stopped at. Good lord, though, these were the comfiest booth seats she'd ever sat on.

"Do tell." Mulder replied, mouth full of eggs. Scully wondered how he always managed to walk the line between gross and adorable.

"How do we convince people of what O'Shea is doing, if the man is infallibly persuasive?" She asked, taking small sips from her too-hot coffee.

"Dumb luck?" He said through his food, muffling the words. Scully raised an eyebrow.

"You are good at that. Think truth and facts have any standing?"

"Scully, this is America!" Mulder said, swallowing a huge mouthful just to shove an even larger portion in, "Truth and facts have never had any standing!"

Scully returned to chewing.

"How does this stone bestow such a gift on O'Shea, but take the voices of these witnesses? Is he granted some sort of omnipotence, as the only lawyer in town, making him spiritually present at all crime scenes?" She posed, thinking out loud.

"Many criminal circles have a policy of silence; maybe somehow it's just more literal here." Mulder replied.

"We have no evidence that anything even like this is happening, Mulder. I'll admit that something weird is going on, but what are we meant to do? We have no idea how it works. We don't know if he's the problem himself, or if it is what he's snorting. We don't know how to catch him and guarantee that we won't be persuaded into letting him walk free."

"Knock him out and take his powder, then we'll see."

"We might see the wrong way. If it's not the powder he could make us do _anything_ , Mulder. He could walk away with any manner of confidential information."

"Worth it. Let's drug him." He said, enthused. Scully tore the corner off her paper napkin, then relented to Mulder. God, she hated that this was the way it always went. Someone needed to hold Mulder's leash, and he rarely let it be her.

"I suppose we just have to convince Skinner to get the go ahead." She said.

"Then you'd better call him." Mulder said, sipping coffee and watching their fellow diners to avoid looking at Scully – he could never make eye contact when she was annoyed without laughing.

"Why me?" She huffed.

"He loves you like a bird loves a bee." He replied. He stole the last mouthful off her plate. She watched and didn't stop him, having already mentally put that piece aside for him.

"I'm pretty sure that adage wasn't about interspecies relationships." She said.

"That's so mean to the Skinman! He'd be a beautiful bee, way out of your league." Mulder replied, defensive on Skinner's behalf.

"Fine! I'll call him!" Scully said, putting down her cutlery and napkin to move to the payphone she'd spotted at the back of the diner. She stepped away from the table, only to realise Mulder had her hand and was pulling her back.

"No need; I called while you were in the bathroom." Mulder said. Scully looked him dead in the eyes and sighed, sitting back down and picking up her fork to stab at a bit of egg on his plate.

"Mulder, do you realise how much time you waste?"


	7. Chapter 7

O'Shea was, at that very moment, up to activities that would condemn him, were he witnessed. He sprinkled out some of the grey powder from a vial in his pocket onto the flat surface of his desk, the last dregs of dust coughing out of the container. He formed the powder into two thin lines with his business card, and snorted them quickly, wrinkling his nose up at the end.

He then rose, shook out his limbs, and got into his car – an expensive but wholly dusty black car. He drove to a storage unit, opened up number 44, and came face to face with a room that was almost entirely empty except for a rock about the size of a large brick. He pulled a chisel from his suit pocket, removed its cover, and broke off a chunk off the rock. He used the handle of the chisel to smash the rock into a fine powder, and he carefully swept it into his vial.

When Steven O'Shea had decided to move from the south west of his native Ireland to Texas, he was pleased to find the familiarly named town of Shamrock, which boasted a piece of his home in the Blarney Stone. He was even more pleased, however, in walking into the assessment of his new home, to find that this was not the only piece.

It had lived on his mantel for a while. Work was slim in the small town, and he often went weeks with nothing to do, and so he cleaned. His house was spotless, top to bottom, save for the powdery dust next to the stone that he cleaned around out of respect.

After a particularly long stretch of nothingness, his phone finally rang. He approached the stone, kissed it for good luck as he left, and inhaled a little of the powder as he breathed in, spluttering a little.

He won the case in record time.

He wasn't sure exactly when he had elevated from kissing the stone, to giving it a tentative lick, to snorting lines of it to cheat his way through work. He wasn't sure when exactly it was he first noticed the correlation between the increase in crime locally and his performance in cases. He wasn't sure exactly when it was he first noticed that the more he talked, the less his witnesses could. He wasn't sure exactly when it was he stopped caring.

With the rock more than half used up now, O'Shea was beginning to get reckless. He would use large amounts of it in one go to burn through cases faster – but more cases kept falling into his lap at an ever increasing rate. His latest case, the armed robbery, had managed to attract the attention of two FBI agents.

He didn't know how extreme the next case might be.

He put the refilled vial into his pocket.


	8. Chapter 8

Mulder and Scully sat in the car in their usual positions. Scully watched the landscapes pass her through the passenger side window. In her hands she held a map, which she squinted at, and then folded away. Mulder drove straight down the road. He drummed his fingers on the steering wheel, his mind miles away. Scully watched him, watched a bead of sweat form on his forehead and drip slowly down to meet his sideburns. She looked away.

"I say the best time to grab him is when we see him start to go for his next fix." Scully said, attempting to plan, "He won't be so persuasive then. If we wait for him at the back of the courtroom again -"

"Well sure, but I'd thought that stealing his rocks for ourselves would put us on equal footing." Mulder said, making Scully roll her eyes for perhaps the three hundredth time that day – about their average.

"I think the Bureau frowns on its agents snorting rocks, Mulder, whether they're crack or mystical Irish stone."

"Don't be so silly, Scully! You can't snort crack!"

"Okay, well how do you propose we apprehend him? We can't let him charm us, and we can't move on him without a little more evidence of, y'know, his magical abilities that were gifted to him by a _stone_." Scully said, sarcasm oozing.

"Ever the cynic, Scully. I have a plan."

"A cunning plan?" She said mockingly. He didn't rise to it.

"A very cunning plan. You'll be blown away."

"Hmm." She said doubtfully, "I'll duck for cover."


End file.
